Freelance journalist and Independent political activist, open to offers in both capacities. Contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Accepts PayPal.

Saturday, 22 December 2012

Beating The Bounds

Glyn Davies, the MP for Montgomeryshire, have never voted against the Conservative Party line. But the dreaded Parliamentary Boundaries Bill is about to be yanked out of its shallow grave.

It has always boggled the mind
that ostensible heirs of Burke could have had any truck whatever with this
proposal. A parliamentary constituency really ought to reflect some sort of
community on the ground, wouldn't you have thought? And Montgomeryshire
is a very ancient community on the ground. There are many, many others. Whatever happened to Toryism?

However, if 500 MPs were to be elected
from constituencies each containing as near as possible to one fifth of one per
cent of the electorate, then another 102 could be elected by each of the
English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh historic
counties (one of which is Montgomeryshire) and the Northern Irish counties, with candidacy restricted to registered voters within the county, most preferably of some years' standing.
That might even help the Conservatives. In any year other than 2015, anyway.

Each of the 12 areas already used
for European Elections could then elect a further three, with each of us voting
for one candidate and the top three being elected at the end. In 2015, that
might be the last thing that could save the Conservative Party, guaranteeing it
and its Ulster Unionist allies 12 seats out of 638. Even if between them they
won not a single one more by either of the other means.

The Lib Dems would probably imagine that they, too, might benefit from such arrangements, or at any rate that such arrangements might spare them electoral oblivion. In reality, it would be well within the power of Labour and its allies to prove them wrong on that, if the necessary effort were to be made. In the meantime, though, let them be cajoled, along with scores or hundreds of shire Tories, into voting for this. The opportunity being presented by a Labour three-line whip in favour of this most Glasmanite and Cruddasite of schemes.

2 comments:

Being reading your arguments about this over on Coffee House. They don't get it at all over there. Anybody who still doubts that Thatcher killed Toryism need only read their blind incomprehension of you arguments about natural communities on the ground. All they can see are numbers.

The thing that really strikes me, although of course it does not surprise me, is that they have obviously never heard of Burke.

Therefore, they will not know that after the death of Marie Antoinette, he commented that the world had fallen into the hands of sophists, economists and calculators.

Imagine saying that on there, never mind on something like Telegraph Blogs. Imagine the screeching about "Common Purpose", "Stockholm Syndrome", "Useful Idiots", "the Frankfurt School", and before long "race replacement" and all the rest of it.